Saturday, May 06, 2006

Pensions and landmines

When I'm old, my cats and I do not want to be living on catfood purchased with landmines.

More than half of the $90 billion in assets controlled by the Canadian Pension Plan Investment Board is invested in over 1800 companies, including such arms dealers as Halliburton (in whom we invested $8 million), Raytheon ($4 million), Northrop Grumman ($5.4 million) and General Electric ($323 million).

I was prepared to overlook the $8 million to Monsanto, the $19.5 million to WalMart and the more than $90 million the CPP Investment Board has invested on our behalf in the tobacco industry, but I really do have to draw the line at the $5.5 million we are giving Lockheed Martin to make more landmines and cluster bombs.

On April 27, 2006, the CPP Investment Board announced that it had signed a global set of Principles for Responsible Investing published by the United Nations Environment Programme Financial Initiative (UNEPFI).You can contact CPPIB here and ask them how this will affect their policy of investing in warmongers.

Slowgirl provides a link to the Coalition to Oppose the Arms Trade, or COAT, where you can follow the money from the CCPIB to the arms dealers and back to the politicians, and sign the petition.

And if you're wondering how your Canada Pension Plan shares are doing in Exxon or McDonald's or Nike or Dow Chem, the CCPIB site provides this handy list from March 2005.

4 comments:

Well, if this isn't just perfectly timely. I just got back from the StopWar.ca annual general meeting. The lovely and blisteringly to-the-point GAil Davidson was updating on her quest to have George Bush indicted for war crimes. Anthony Fenton who, together with Yves Engler wrote a book on the appalling complicity of Canada in the exploitation of Haiti for many years, the illegal kidnapping of their overwhelmingly popular elected leader, Jean Bertrand Aristide, supplying Canadian military and police personnel to train the death squads that raided the slums such as Cite Solei where Canadian manufacturers like Gildan draw their sweatshop labour and overseeing the horribly inept/corrupt elections where hundreds of thousands of ballots were stolen and discarded in a dump (presided over by the so-called international forces).Whew!! Where was I?Right: the AGM: Some of my Iranian friends came by to peak about the US "coalition" threat to Iran. Their very strong point was: We are already resisting and working towards a change in our government. We have robust womens' youth and labour organizations that the existing government will crush if there are blockades, sanctions or an outright attack on Iran. They want us to support them: the people of Iran. They want us to let them have hte autonomy and sovereignty to determine their own futures, not some Walmart-styled democracy that will conveniently allow western powers to control their resources and build military bases so that they can control other nations who are deemed to be in their way. Sorry, I think they're called "failed states" these days.So, the upshot of all of this is a member proposed that we investigate and support tax diversion from support for the military and a military filter on all CPP investments. I've agreed to help with research and advocacy. We would certainly welcome anyone who wants to be part of a major shift from a war economy to a peace economy.

It just occured to me (I'm a little slow) that we could contract Lockheed Martin to COUNT the number of people they BLOW UP!That would occupy (no pun intended) them for a little while and we could conduct our own goddam census...